Transracial adoption studies are a powerful methodology for examining the relative contribution of genetics and environment to average differences in IQ across racial and ethnic groups. The best — and most famous — transracial adoption study was the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study (MTAS) conducted by Sandra Scarr and her colleagues (Scarr & Weinberg, 1976; Weinberg…
Illiterate people’s thinking probably remains grounded in their everyday experience. When these people take a test that solely measures abstract thinking, they perform poorly. This does not make them stupid. Instead, it shows the disconnect between their natural mode of thought and the unfamiliar test content.
Despite my disappointment in the book, I think scholars of intelligence should read it.
Nobody questions the existence of the Flynn effect, which is the tendency for average IQ scores in a population to increase over time. The effect has been found in every country where data exist (Flynn, 1987), and the phenomenon has now been studied for over 30 years.
Sometimes the fish does not realize that it’s wet. That was my realization this week after I posted a brief description of a study that was recently published. The study (Schneider et al., 2020) showed that a short training video led a randomly selected experimental group to have IQ scores over 15 points higher than…
Last year, I co-authored an article with my student where we identified the first known publication of the subtests that appear on the Stanford-Binet 5, the WPPSI-IV, WISC-V, and WAIS-IV (Gibbons & Warne, 2019). Much to our suprise, we found that the majority of subtest formats on these popular intelligence tests were created by 1908.…
One of the most highly cited articles in intelligence research is a 1996 report commissioned by the American Psychological Association’s Board of Scientific Affairs to provide an authoritative statement on the science of intelligence (Neisser et al., 1996). What many people do not know, though, is that this was not the first time APA’s Board…
Last week, I had a new article published by the American Psychological Association in Teaching of Psychology (Burton & Warne, in press). The article has two parts: an analysis of course catalogs, and an outline for a university-level intelligence course. Course Catalog Analysis My then-student, Jared Z. Burton, identified 303 of the top universities in…
